Customer Reviews

Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies)

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This collection of essays edited by Lester Grabbe address what appears to be the major historical debate in Old Testament research: Josiah and his reform. The selection of essays covers a range of opinions and approaches the problem from different methodologies. In short, there is little extrabiblical evidence supporting the reform of Josiah and the finding of the scroll. Furthermore, there appears to be plenty of extrabiblical references to Manasseh who some of the authors feel was vilified by the Deuteronomist Historian(s).

While the work is intelligent, scholarly and well argued we must remember that we are expecting access to information about historic events that occurred over 2600 years ago. Frankly, it appears that these events are lost to us and we can only scratch the surface with conclusions based upon limited data.

The critics assume that the DeH is a theological document that has some core historic truths but was written and redacted with other purposes in mind. This should not undermine our faith for Israel has always understood its history as being a salvation history guided and ordained by God. A similar statement can be made about the written documents from the various empires of the period that may have been selective and distorted to glorify the king and his accomplishments and were not concerned with the issues important to scripture.

Rather than undermine the authority of the scripture, such silence from extrabiblical sources reinforce scriptures demand that, as Karl Barth says, "read the Bible Biblically." While such debates are important they are tangential to the Bible's purpose of salvation history and the argument from silence is basically faith in scripture or in biblical science.

The student and scholar must keep in his mind these two issues separate. For those interested this work will be a standard.